media and politics of japanese history

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e Media and Politics of Japanese Popular History:

e Case of the Akō Gishi

Henry SMITH

Columbia University

All cultures, from ancient to contemporary, retell tales of heroes of the past, over andover again. Modern Japan seems especially inundated with this kind of popular history, assuch stock characters as Yoshitsune, Hideyoshi, Musashi, and Ryōma are endlessly recycledin plays, films, TV specials, and historical novels. How did this pattern come to pass? Whyhave certain stories persisted and flourished so much longer than others? is essay exam-

ines the single case of the 47 Rōnin—known more widely in Japanese as the “Gishi” 義士

(‘Righteous Samurai’) and still more broadly as “Chūshingura” 忠臣蔵 (after the kabukitradition)—in an effort to probe the historical dynamics of the way in which certain storieshave thrived, while others have fallen by the way. e answers are not simple, and I wish hereto pursue one particular theme, of the way in which the historical evolution of the changingmedia of communication has worked in concert with politics to enable certain types of storiesto achieve special preeminence. “Historiography” by its very etymology privileges writtentexts, but a true historiography of popular history forces us to broaden our range to embracethe performing arts and particularly their modern perpetuation in film and television.

Satō Tadao’s Concept of “sakuhingun”e film critic Satō Tadao has provided a useful notion for looking at these peculiarly

powerful constellations of stories, which he refers to as sakuhingun作品群, a “collection ofworks” but perhaps better conceived of as a “story complex” constituted by many individualworks in multiple genres and media that remain united under a core story with branchingsubplots. Most are unified by a main character or in some cases (notably that of Chūshingura)a group of characters. Satō enumerates ten representative sakuhingun:1

1) Minamoto Yoshitsune源義経 (1159-89)2) e Soga Brothers曽我兄弟 (1172/74-93)

3) Toyotomi Hideyoshi豊臣秀吉 (1536-98)4) Miyamoto Musashi宮本武蔵 (1584-1645)5) e “Ten Brave Heroes” (Jūyūshi十勇士) of Sanada Yukimura真田幸村 (1567-1615)

6) Mito Kōmon 水戸黄門 [Tokugawa Mitsukuni 徳川光圀] (1628-1700)7) Akō Gishi赤穂義士 [“Chūshingura”] (1701-03)8) e Shinsengumi新撰組 (1863-68)9) Sakamoto Ryōma坂本竜馬 (1835-67)10) Shimizu Jirōchō清水次郎長 (1820-93)

Many other candidates can be found, but these particular examples are distinguished by theirstaying power over a long period of time. Satō’s list is probably biased to sakuhingun promi-



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nent in film, his own area of expertise, but film has in fact been central to the perpetuation ofmost sakuhingun in the twentieth century.

Accepting the sakuhingun on Satō’s list as the most celebrated and enduring, three el-

ementary observations are in order. First, all are based on well-documented historical figureswhose lives turned gradually into legend, a process that could take many years but that oftenbegan very soon after their deaths. is did not preclude the later creation of entirely fictionalcharacters within the larger sakuhingun, a process that in fact became a standard pattern; itis exemplified by such figures in the “Gishiden” 義士伝 (Lives of the Gishi) storytellingtradition as Murakami Kiken村上喜剣 (a Satsuma samurai who berated the league leaderŌishi Kuranosuke 大石内蔵助 for his dissipation and committed suicide out of remorsewhen he learned of the success of the revenge) or Tawaraboshi Genba俵星玄蕃 (a swords-man who assisted the cause in Edo).2 Second, all were samurai except for Shimizu Jirōchō, alocal boss with samurai-like pretensions. Commoners appear prominently in all fully devel-

oped versions of each sakuhingun, as an obvious way of enhancing the popular appeal, but theoriginary protagonists were almost always professional warriors.ird, the distribution by era of the historical figures reveals a striking clustering in

the three great eras of political turmoil and transition in Japanese history: the Genpei Warin the late twelfth century (and its political aftermath in the early thirteenth century underthe Hōjō family), the period of warfare and subsequent unification from the late sixteenthinto the early seventeenth century, and the age of the Meiji Restoration in the nineteenthcentury. ese are the pivotal eras of transition between each of the four conventional epochsof Japanese history: ancient (kodai 古代), medieval (chūsei 中世), early-modern (kinsei 近

世), and modern (kindai 近代). is is scarcely surprising, but it does serve to remind us that

in the popular imagination, most of Japanese history is compressed into three eras of intensemilitary and political conflict, with a cumulative span of scarcely more than one century. etwo exceptions on Satō’s list are Mito Kōmon and Chūshingura, both derived from events ofthe Genroku period (1688-1704).

But why, out of the countless samurai stories of the past, did only a small numberevolve into an extensive and durable sakuhingun? Satō offers three broad observations. First,he notes that most sakuhingun have a strong potential for expansion into a large number ofdifferent characters, either because the protagonists were multiple to begin with, or becausethe protagonists themselves traveled widely, meeting many new and interesting people asthey moved about the country. Some, like the Akō Gishi and the Shinsengumi, are of their

essence stories about relatively large groups, and the Chūshingura sakuhingun in particularmushroomed within the kōdan 講談 storytelling tradition through the device of the meimei-den 銘々伝 (separate tales for each of the forty-seven avengers) and the gaiden 外伝 (storiesabout those who assisted the rōnin, mostly family members, servants, and sympathizers).Travel is a less conspicuous motif of the Chūshingura sakuhingun, although Satō observesthat many of the rōnin were strangers to the city of Edo, which itself became the site of newadventures in unfamiliar territory. e classic example of a travel-based story-cycle is that ofMito Kōmon, a feudal lord who wanders about the country in disguise to observe conditionsin the provinces.



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e Media and Politics of Japanese Popular History

Another revealing commonality of the greatest of the sakuhingun, according to Satō, isthat they typically deal with historical figures who died higō no shi 非業の死, “deaths notin accord with karma,” what might be called “angry” or “vengeful” deaths, subdued by their

enemies with their hatreds and burning ambitions unquenched. Some fit the characterizationof what Ivan Morris called “noble failures,” losers who engender popular sympathy preciselyfor their valiant efforts, a mentality that has come to be known as hōgan biiki 判官贔屓,favor for the underdog, an explicit reference to the prototypical case of Yoshitsune (who heldthe post of hōgan).3 Others explicitly sought revenge against an enemy, of which the classicexample is the Soga Brothers, who took revenge on their father’s killer but themselves per-ished in the process.4

e spirits of those who die such deaths become “angry ghosts” (onryō 怨霊, arahito-

gami 現人神), with the power to bring on sickness or natural disaster unless placated by wor-ship and offerings, which can also become a way of drawing on their special power to enhance

one’s personal fortune. is deep-rooted belief in angry ghosts (onryō shinkō ) has promoted,according to Satō, the retelling of the stories of such vengeful heroes as an amuletic and auspi-cious performance, seen most clearly in the convention that was established in 1709 in all theEdo kabuki theaters of performing a Soga play as a celebration of the New Year.5

In looking at each separate case, Satō admits that some of the major sakuhingun fit the“angry spirit” pattern better than others. e cases of Miyamoto Musashi and Mito Kōmon,for example, do not fit at all, but he finds a way to make most of the others conform tothe pattern. Here our interest is Chūshingura, for which the argument seems at least partlysuited. I will return to this issue later, and here only note that the historical Akō avengerswere driven by a perceived need to carry through on the unfulfilled wrath of their own mas-

ter against Kira Yoshinaka 吉良義央, and that although they succeeded in their goal, theysacrificed their own lives in the process—and, especially in later legends, the lives of variousfamily members as well. e Gishi also came to be worshipped incessantly at their graves atSengakuji 泉岳寺 in Edo, surely as a way of taking on power and fortune by appeasing thespirits of those who died by an act of vengeance.6

e final characteristic that Satō saw as conducive to the formation of major sakuhingun was an “integration of politics with the lives of the people,”7 by which he appears to meanthat while the heroes mingle with the people in their day-to-day activities, their actions ulti-mately have wider political implications. In the pattern of the “noble failures,” the protago-nists are often those who challenge the dominant political powers and die in the process, as

with Yoshitsune’s defiance of his half-brother Yoritomo 頼朝, or Sanada Yukimura’s supportof Toyotomi Hideyori秀頼 in opposition to the Tokugawa regime. Satō suggests that theunderlying sentiment is less one of political opposition to established authority than the reli-gious conviction of the need to appease the powerful spirits of the vanquished. Whatever theprecise mix, it is revealing that the heroes of popular history include both those who playedan important role on the national political stage, as well as those who in the end were crushedby those in power. In tracing the history of the Chūshingura sakuhingun, we will see that thebroader political context has always been crucial to its evolution, in ways that apply to othersakuhingun as well.



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e “Media Complex” as a Complement of Sakuhingun

Satō Tadao’s explanation of the common features of leading sakuhingun is suggestive,but fails to take into account the historical evolution of sakuhingun in general. To provide

this essential historical dimension, I offer a parallel notion of “media complex” (in Japanese,media-gunメディア群), the distinctive mix of media by which people in any given histori-cal era learn of things beyond their own immediate community. ese “media complexes”have been structured both by available technologies of communication and by the politicaldeterminants of what kinds of stories are told, either through negative prohibition or positivepromotion. As a broad working model, I would posit four successive historical media com-plexes that vary both by media technology and political environment.

1) Medieval . e medieval sakuhingun was predominantly an oral and performanceculture, centered primarily on theater (especially noh) and on itinerant storytellers,further supported by a small but growing cottage industry of manuscript reproduc-

tion. Barbara Ruch has argued that the stories which emerged in the Muromachiperiod came to constitute a “national literature” for Japan, including two that Satōclassifies as sakuhingun, those of Yoshitsune and the Soga Brothers. ese storieswere transmitted primarily by itinerant minstrels (“jongleurs” in Ruch’s terminol-ogy), whose mission was initially religious but whose performances came increas-ingly to take on the quality of secular entertainment. Some were blind, as manywere women as men, and most performed to musical accompaniment, typically thelute (biwa ). e worldview of these tales remained strongly Buddhist, despite theemerging demand of urban audiences for more secular stories, and storytelling itselfwas rooted in the power of the voice to invoke the magical efficacy of the gods. As

Ruch emphasizes, this was not an oral tradition apart from written texts, but rathera “vocal literature” that often relied on the manuscript texts that came to be repro-duced in quantity with hand-painted illustrations, so that even before the spread ofprint in the seventeenth century, “the book had become a familiar part of Japaneselife.”8

2) Tokugawa. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the first century of Tokuga-wa rule, a radically new media complex emerged with the explosive growth ofprinted books and the emergence of a sophisticated urban commercial theater. egrowing restrictions on print and stage by the regime, however, not only enabledbut actually encouraged the further evolution of a robust oral story-telling tradition,

expanding in mode from itinerant performers to increasing numbers of numeroussmall-theater ( yose 寄席) performance spaces by the end of the Tokugawa period,and in content from religious to secular and especially historical tales. At the sametime, a thriving market emerged in manuscript texts for rental reading through thekashihon’ya 貸本屋 book-lenders, a distinctive and crucial institution in perpetuat-ing and promoting the sakuhingun. is dual structure of print and urban theateron the one hand, and oral storytelling and manuscript reading on the other, wouldbe critical to the growth of Chūshingura in the two wholly different registers ofthe theatrical tradition of Kanadehon Chūshingura on the one hand, and the oral /manuscript lineage of Gishiden on the other.



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3) Meiji . e new media complex of the Meiji period was of a transitional nature,enabled less by any change in the media technologies than by the radical change inthe political environment of public expression, which remained rooted in the media

of print, theater, and oral storytelling. After the Meiji Restoration, the liberation ofTokugawa political restrictions opened the possibility of the conversion of the oralkōdan tradition into print, a process that proceeded quickly after the introduction ofshorthand as an easy way to get speech into text. At the same time, the conversion ofprinting from woodblock to moveable type with power presses greatly extended therange and affordability of printed books. e technological changes here were moregradual than radical, but they had a profound effect on the ways in which historicaltales were communicated to ordinary Japanese.

4) Modern. e decisive leap in media technologies came from late Meiji into Taisho(1910s through 1920s), with the rapid spread of phonographs and movies, both of

which would prove critical in the diffusion of the Gishiden. e appearance of the47 Rōnin in television from the 1950s was simply a logical extension of the progres-sive evolution from kōdan to naniwabushi and on to film and television. e criticalintervention into this linear progression was the emergence of the modern histori-cal novel in the 1920s, which was both an evolution and a break from kōdan, andultimately a decisive influence on the evolution of film and television from the late1920s on until the present.

is succession of media complexes structured the development of all of the sakuhingun,each of which at the same time was affected by a variety of other circumstances as well, such asthe inherent quality of the tale and of the way in which individual authors worked to develop

it in innovative and expansive ways. e following analysis of the case of Chūshingura showshow this process worked for what became the greatest of all the sakuhingun.

e Formation of the Chūshingura sakuhingun under Tokugawa Rule

During the century of Tokugawa rule that had elapsed by the time of the Akō incidentof 1701-03, the environments of storytelling were transformed, both in the available mediaand in the political controls to which they were now subjected. First and foremost, wood-block printing became commercially viable by the 1620s, and over the following decades,all of the key texts of military tales that had previously circulated only in manuscript werenow made widely available in print, in multiple editions.9 e Heike monogatari 平家物

語 (12 vols., 11 editions 1621-1686) and Gikeiki義経記 (8 vols., 8 editions 1633-1697)provided the basic data for the Yoshitsune tales, the Soga monogatari 曽我物語 (12 vols., 6editions 1626-1692) for the revenge of the Soga Brothers, and the Taikōki太閤記 (22 vols.,3 editions, 1630-1661) for stories about Hideyoshi and the Toyotomi clan. Also of greatimportance was the Taiheiki太平記 (21 vols., 9 editions 1609-1688), which had existed asa stable written text from its origins in the 1370s and provided the material for the “readers”of the text (Taiheiki - yomi 太平記読み) who evolved into the kōdan storytellers that wouldbe critical to perpetuating and embellishing on many of the sakuhingun from the eighteenthinto the nineteenth century.



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e wide circulation of these core texts in print also made their contents easily availableto the new writers of emergent genres of printed fiction (kanazōshi 仮名草子, then ukiyozōshi 浮世草子) and for the puppet and kabuki theaters that became the most popular forms of

urban entertainment in the Genroku period. is was the first crucial step in the cross-mediaproliferation of military tales, which had been first circulated to popular audiences by itiner-ant minstrels but now became major sources of inspiration for fiction in print and for theurban stage. Print and stage now joined oral storytelling and manuscript reproduction as theprime media for popular history in Japan, a revolutionary transformation that marked theshift from the medieval to the Tokugawa media complex.

e Tokugawa regime witnessed this process with mounting concern, and put intoplace in the later seventeenth century restrictions that would have a profound and lastingeffect on the way in which historical tales were circulated. Earlier Tokugawa controls wereconcerned primarily with moral propriety, as seen in the successive prohibition of female and

then young male actors on the kabuki stage, but the astonishing growth of the publishingindustry in the middle decades of the seventeenth century, first in Kyoto-Osaka and thenfrom the 1660s in Edo, led to mounting bakufu concern over the power of the press. efirst decisive edict appeared in 1673, enjoining woodblock publishers from any mention ofbakufu affairs ( go-kōgi no gi 御公儀之義), and requiring them to seek permission to printanything that might “cause problems for people” (shojin meiwaku tsukamatsurisōrō gi 諸人迷惑仕候儀), as well as things that are “strange” (mezurashiki koto 珍敷事). Similar edictsfollowed in 1684 and 1698, adding “suspicious things” (utagawashiku zonjisōrō gi うたがハしく存候儀), “faddish things” (hayarigotoはやり事), and “unusual things of the moment”(tōza no kawaritaru koto 当座之替りたる事).10 is utterly subjective language effectively

stifled all public or printed talk of current affairs in Tokugawa Japan.e prohibition of news was paralleled by the prohibition of any discussion of theactivities not only of the ruling shogunal clan, but of all higher samurai families, lest theirancestral honor be sullied. is is a striking contrast with military regimes both in other cul-tures and in other periods of Japanese history, which were often eager to promote tales of theaccomplishments of their dynastic line. But in a manner characteristic of all Tokugawa rule,the prohibition of reports in print about current events and elite history was never extremeor draconian, and left those affected with a wide margin of self-enforcement. e resultingcompromise, worked out in ways that we can only guess at in the absence of any specificationsin the surviving historical documents, was peculiar, and would have a profound and lasting

impact on all later popular history in Japan, continuing on long after the collapse of the Edobakufu.

e effects of this system can be most clearly understood by looking at the single caseof the Akō incident, which occurred within a generation of the first edicts restricting newsin print. is meant that no open public reporting of the actual incident in print, using thereal names of the participants, was possible—at least not until the 1850s, well over a centurylater, when the ban was effectively relaxed.11 In the meantime, the history of this dramaticincident was perpetuated by way of a curious dual structure. On the one hand, it was pos-sible to recreate the incident both in print and on the urban stage, but only by disguisingthe names and transposing the historical era—in other words, by converting history into a



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kind of fantasy, or sometimes parody. e death of the shogun Tsunayoshi 綱吉 in early1709 led to an outpouring of stage recreations of the Akō incident in the Kyoto-Osaka areain 1710, unleashing a chain of influence that would culminate in the puppet play Kanadehon

Chūshingura in 1747.e names of the characters in such plays were so thinly disguised, as seen most clearlyin the conversion of Ōishi Kuranosuke, the historical leader of the Akō revenge, into the stagerole of “Ōboshi Yuranosuke” 大星由良之助, that no one was fooled. But this transparentgesture made all the difference, as did the transposition of the historical era back to that ofthe fourteenth-century Muromachi bakufu. e very power of the drama on both the puppetand kabuki stages, as for powerful theater in any era, was premised on its capacity to reachbeyond the narrow constraints of historical chronology to present more universal truths. Itwas of its nature set apart from the wholly different premises of historical tales.

It is important, in this context, to acknowledge the immense success of Kanadehon

Chūshingura as a dramatic work, wholly apart from the historical incident that directly in-spired it. As the longest jōruri ever written for the puppet stage, Kanadehon effectively synthe-sized all the best stage devices and plot twists of over a dozen earlier plays, and within a gen-eration had established itself as overwhelmingly the most popular play within the repertoireof both the puppet and kabuki theaters, a supremacy that has continued to the present day.is alone sets the Chūshingura sakuhingun apart from all others. Kanadehon Chūshingurawas so successful on the stage that it became a cultural phenomenon in and of itself, penetrat-ing into every genre of later Edo popular fiction and poetry. Far from history, it became ana-historical assortment of allusions that all aficionados of the theater instantly recognized, andthat could therefore be endlessly mobilized for parodic amusement.

Meanwhile, in parallel with the fantasy life of Kanadehon Chūshingura but largely apartfrom it, the “real” story of the Akō revenge took on a life of its own, in the alternate worldof oral story-telling and manuscript novels that remained largely beyond the reach—or atleast the concern—of the regime. is is the domain of the “Gishi,” the term that emergedfrom an early point as the standard epithet for the 47 Rōnin in the world of quasi-historicalnarration.12 e oral storytellers emerged from the tradition of “Taiheiki -yomi,” a practiceof reading and commenting on the written text of the Taiheiki that had emerged amongmonk-specialists in the sixteenth century, and which by the time of the Akō incident was ina process of transition to a purely secular form of storytelling to popular audiences on streetcorners and in stalls of the great cities. is art came to be known as kōshaku 講釈 or kōdan,

the latter term becoming predominant by the mid-nineteenth century. Kōdan storytelling, aswe will see, would be the pivotal medium for the diffusion of the Gishiden into almost all ofthe subsequent modern media.

e oral tales of kōdan were rarely recorded as written texts until the technique of ste-nography was introduced from England and adapted for Japanese in the 1880s, but they didhave an Edo-period textual analogue in the manuscript texts known today as jitsuroku 実録,“true accounts,” by virtue of their pretension to recount actual historical events. Like kōdan performance itself, the jitsuroku manuscripts were at one level simply a way of skirting theformal prohibitions of the bakufu, which were enforced systematically only for printed pub-lications.13 Since jitsuroku were anonymous and distributed through kashihon’ya peddlers, the



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regime could not easily patrol them. e end result was to establish a popular habit of rentalreading that would continue far into the twentieth century.

Tokugawa Japan thus offers a remarkable example of a regime that evolved a passive

and indirect mode of rule that negated all public politics as divisive. e result was to shunthistorical narratives of the Tokugawa regime itself (including the decades of the late sixteenthcentury when it came to power) into the streets and small theaters, and into the hand-writtenhistorical romances circulated by book-lending peddlers, where they took on a special imagi-native power precisely because they were officially discouraged. By the 1860s, the recountingof popular history in Japan had thus fallen into its dual structure as a result of the vacuum atthe top. On the one hand, the most formal and powerful media of print and urban stage wereforced to purvey a patently fictional form of historical narrative, while the telling of overtlyhistorical tales was shunted into marginal realms where it thrived and grew, treating historyas a didactic form of popular entertainment.

e Meiji Transition: From Voice to Print and Song

e collapse of the Tokugawa regime and the advent of the aggressively modernizingMeiji state after 1868 had surprisingly little immediate impact on the established modes ofpopular history in Japan. In the case of the Gishiden, as with all of the older sakuhingun, thesheer inertia of generations of repetition insured that at least for the current generation, allwould continue as usual. is was particularly true for the deeply rooted theatrical traditionof Kanadehon Chūshingura , which continued to be as vital as ever to the kabuki theater, as itcontinues to be today. e play is often referred to as the dokujintō独参湯or “surefire rem-edy” for a theater in the doldrums—an expression of which the origin remains unclear, but

which has been most frequently used in the modern period.In Meiji as before, Kanadehon Chūshingura remained disconnected from the historical

story of the Akō revenge, having taken on a theatrical life of its own that was impervious tointeraction with the more avowedly historical lineage. e kabuki version remained tightlyconnected to its puppet origins and jōruri text, reaffirmed with each performance by the ap-pearance of a puppet to announce the performers, and a mimicking of puppet actions in theopening tableau. e enduring place of this one play as paramount in the hierarchy of kabukifame was clearly essential to the popularity of the broader phenomenon of “Chūshingura” towhich it gave its name. Kanadehon Chūshingura has served as a continuing stage—both liter-ally and figuratively—of the larger sakuhingun, a persistent background setting that continues

even today, however few Japanese may actually see a kabuki or bunraku performance.e most critical change in Meiji Japan came with the further growth of kōdan sto-

rytelling. As we have seen, kōdan survived and grew within a marginal gray zone under theTokugawa regime, tolerated as it continued to spread within the small yose theaters in theearly nineteenth century, but subject to occasional crackdowns on the theaters themselves(notably in the Tenpō Reforms of the early 1840s). is changed after 1868, although thepolice continued to watch these small theaters closely. e critical feature of kōdan was thatthe tales were presented as history, however embellished and fictionalized, and in almost everycase they were derived from authentic historical figures. To be sure, wholly imaginary charac-ters and new fictional episodes were freely created, but they were always projected as people



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who actually lived and breathed in a particular historical era. No such pretensions were evermaintained on the kabuki stage, where both heroes and villains were larger than life.

Two crucial transformations occurred within kōdan in the Meiji period. Most important

was the conversion of the oral tales to print, something that had been politically impossibleunder the Tokugawa bakufu. is was not as simple as one might imagine, since even thoughthe origins of kōdan lay in the reading of written texts, it had evolved in the late Edo periodinto an art of memory and improvisation. Even though kōdan performers always told theirtales seated on tatami with a lectern and manuscript text before them, they were true oralstorytellers, using the text mostly as prop and prompt (as the few surviving kōdan performerscontinue to do today). But the introduction of stenography made it natural to turn first tokōdan and the closely related art of rakugo 落語, and in short order the best of the repertoirewas phonetically transcribed and put into print, creating the “kōdan book” (kōdanbon 講談本, also known as sokkibon 速記本, “shorthand books”) that would quickly become the

single most popular form of reading matter in Meiji Japan. anks to kōdanbon, the Gishidenwere available from the mid-1880s not only to urban audiences in the countless yose theatersin Tokyo and Osaka, but also in every bookstore in the nation.

e second change was the emergence of the wholly new form of popular entertain-ment known as naniwabushi浪花節, which drew almost all of its content from kōdan. Na-

niwabushi grew out of a complex variety of street performance styles of the late Edo periodthat were much more oriented to ordinary people than kōdan, which continued to cling tothe more ornate and literary style of its origins in Taiheiki-yomi. e forebears of naniwa-bushi performed originally from door to door, originally purveying religious incantations andcharms rather than telling stories, but in the last decades of the Tokugawa period, they had

come to incorporate the coherent narratives of both kōdan and the kabuki theater, while re-taining elements of the religious and entertainment appeal that revealed their deeper connec-tions with the itinerant religious performers of the medieval period. By the early nineteenthcentury, these performers, who bridged the two different genres of chobokure ちょぼくれ(also known as chongare ちょんがれ, and in the Osaka area, ukarebushi うかれ節) andsaimon 祭文, had won over an expanding audience although they continued to be excludedfrom the small theaters, performing in the streets either unprotected or in makeshift stalls.14

e great strength of naniwabushi was song, something that the sober and prosaic artof kōdan had never countenanced. ese lowly street arts had depended on song and dancefrom the very start, and as they matured and advanced in the hierarchy of urban performance

in the nineteenth century, they shed the dance and took on the strong narrative tales ofkōdan, but they retained the song, alternating song and narration to samisen accompanimentin a pattern that had long been established in jōruri . Naniwabushi , however, was free of anyconstraints of school lineages, and could adapt more easily to the free-wheeling environmentof the Meiji market for popular performance. From the 1880s, naniwabushi singers began toadvance into the yose theaters that had until then been the strongholds of kōdan and rakugo,and from the late 1890s, they began to overshadow and outnumber these older arts of song-less narration.

Space does not permit a detailed account of the remarkable story by which naniwabushi emerged in the years during and immediately after the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05,



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but suffice it to say that it effected a transformation of the content of kōdan into a new andpowerful form of mass entertainment that relied heavily on song and samisen. e Gishidenhad always been a staple of kōdan, but they now achieved even greater prominence in nani-

wabushi thanks to their centrality to the repertoire of Tōchūken Kumoemon桃中軒雲右衛

門 (1873-1916), who in June 1907 was catapulted to national fame by performing at theHongōza本郷座 theater, one of the three prestigious large theaters of Meiji Tokyo. It was aremarkable achievement for a performer whose art had only recently emerged from the slumsof Tokyo. Kumoemon’s success triggered a “Gishi boom” in the final years of the Meiji pe-riod, assuring a deeper level of permeation of the tales throughout Japanese society than everbefore. All this was done with no new technologies of performance, although the power ofthe periodical press (which had been non-existent in the Edo period) was critical in spreadingword of Kumoemon’s fame, thus fanning the flames of the Gishi boom.

How did the political freedom to tell the “true stories” of the Gishi in the Meiji period

affect the political implications of the tales? We must recall that the Edo prohibition of re-counting the historical event had no necessary connection with the implications of the Akōrevenge for the bakufu polity, which were at any rate ambiguous. e Akō rōnin themselveshad insisted that they had no complaint against the bakufu itself, only against Kira, althoughthis was to a degree disingenuous. Presented with the dilemma of whether to praise the aveng-ers as righteous retainers or criminal plotters, the bakufu settled on the ingenious solution ofcondemning the rōnin to honorable death by seppuku while praising them for their loyalty totheir overlord. None of these issues ever came up in kōdan and jitsuroku Gishiden, which pre-sented the entire story within the same black-and-white morality of Kanadehon Chūshingura ,rarely even mentioning the final fate of the avengers.

e Meiji state took early advantage of these underlying political ambiguities when theMeiji emperor on his first trip to Edo in the autumn of 1868 sent an emissary to make anoffering at the grave of Ōishi Kuranosuke at Sengakuji, praising him for his loyalty—and as-suming that no one would notice the problematic conflation of loyalty to a provincial daimyowith loyalty to the emperor of the new Meiji state. is ambiguity continued throughout theera of imperial Japan, and I have argued elsewhere that it helps to explain the ease with whichChūshingura survived the political reversal of defeat in World War II.15 If one reads the actualGishiden that became so popular in the late Meiji “Gishi boom,” it is similarly difficult to de-tect a clear ideological message. To be sure, Tōchūken Kumoemon was directly promoted bythe right-wing nationalists of the Gen’yōsha玄洋社 and by some conservative bureaucrats,

taking advantage of the mass chauvinism generated by the war with Russia in 1904-05 andproviding Kumoemon’s slogan of “Bushidō kosui ” 武士道鼓吹 (Drumming up Bushidō).But as Yamamoto Tsuneo has noted in his analysis of the actual content of kōdan and na-

niwabushi tales, however much they may seem congruent with the official values of loyalty,filiality, and sacrifice, in fact most of the stories are about heroes who get ahead in the worldin wholly materialistic ways. In short, they tend less to promote Meiji ideology than the muchmore individualistic Meiji myth of risshin shusse 立身出世, success in the world.16 For allthe patronage of the right wing, the Gishiden seem at heart to have been didactic tales aboutgetting ahead by perseverance, cleverness, and good luck.



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Tales of the Gishi in the Modern Media Complex

e Gishi boom of late Meiji came on the eve of the rapid deployment of new media

technologies that would make a truly “mass” culture possible for the first time. ese werefilm (followed a generation later by the far more powerful medium of television) and thephonograph (followed within a decade by the far more transformative medium of radio). istiming permitted these new media to draw directly on the flourishing kōdan-naniwabushi lin-eage of storytelling, assuring strong continuities with the past. e earliest Chūshingura films,beginning in 1907, were simply excerpts from kabuki versions of Kanadehon Chūshingura .17 Gradually, however, the familiar kōdan anecdotes became the central subject matter, althoughthe setting continued to be stagey and the acting in kabuki style. Only from the 1920s didthe films gradually take on natural and outdoor settings, with more realistic sword-fighting,

Western background music, and talkies from 1932. roughout, however, the stories them-

selves were largely of kōdan extraction, particularly those of the meimeiden and gaiden lineag-es, the modest lengths of which (about a half-hour in a kōdan or naniwabushi performance)lent themselves to early film. e transposition to film was eased by the distinctive institutionof the benshi 弁士, the live narrators of silent film who drew directly on naniwabushi as wellas a variety of other oral traditions to forge their new art of setsumei 説明.18

is is not to say that film made no changes to the existing oral tradition except toexpand its audience. On the contrary, the nature of film as a moving photographic imagecreated a wholly novel set of demands for pictorial realism. Whereas the storyteller can painta visual image with a series of telling details (a technique at which Tōchūken Kumoemon wasespecially skilled), in film there are many particulars that one cannot easily leave out, above

all such items of daily life as hairstyle, costume, architecture, and customs. Where the textualfield can pick and choose among such details selectively for the best effect, the visual fieldhas difficulty in omitting any of them. is drove a great deal of research from the 1930s onuntil the present into the study of period authenticity ( jidai kōshō 時代考証), which by goodfortune coincided with a boom in fūzokushi 風俗史, the study of the history of traditionalcustoms.

Perhaps the most striking example of the concern for period authenticity is MizoguchiKenji’s film version of Mayama Seika’s 真山青果 series of modern kabuki plays, Genroku

Chūshingura 元禄忠臣蔵, released in two parts in December 1941 and January 1942. eopening credits list fully eight “kōshōsha ” 考証者 who were all leading experts in their fields,

including Ōkuma Yoshikuni大熊喜邦for samurai architecture, Ebara Taizō 頴原退蔵 forlanguage, and Ogawa Jihei 小川治兵衛 for gardens, with others for minka architecture,noh drama, and historical facts. All of this reflects Mayama’s own obsession with historicity,evident in the long and detailed stage instructions of his original text, which was intendedas much for the pleasures of readers of the printed text of the plays than as relevant materialsfor theatrical staging.19

In the other major realm of technological transformation, phonograph records emergedas a viable commercial medium just as the Gishi boom in naniwabushi was at its peak. efirst record of a Gishi tale was issued in August, 1910, and many others followed withinthe next few years. Phonograph records were a restricted medium, however, since they were



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relatively costly and could only record three minutes on one side, which made it impossibleto convey an extended narrative, often limiting naniwabushi content to the song segments,assuming an audience already familiar with the story. e true revolution came only with

radio when national public broadcasting began in 1928. e first national survey of radiolisteners in 1932 revealed naniwabushi programs to be number one in popularity among 57per cent of the listeners.20 is suggests that orality, which had always been a central channelfor the transmission of historical tales in Japan, continued strongly into the modern periodin ways that are rarely recognized, bolstered by the new technologies of sound recording andradio transmission, and reaching far broader audiences than ever in the past.

Parallel to these momentous technological media revolutions, another crucial develop-ment was the emergence of the modern historical novel, which worked to transform the verycontent of the stories even as the new media enhanced their distribution. Already in the lateTokugawa period, the jitsuroku lineage had begun to influence new printed narratives, such as

Ehon Chūshingura絵本忠臣蔵 of 1800, an illustrated account of the Akō revenge that con-tinued to disguise the names but otherwise drew on the content of a specific jitsuroku text. Ina revealing study of this work, Yamamoto Takashi sees a shift from the fragmented and diffuse“proto-history” of jitsuroku to the coherent narrative continuity of true “history.”21 A furthermilestone in historical accounts of the Akō incident was passed in the 1850s when for the firsttime, detailed narratives appeared in print using the real names of all the historical partici-pants, set clearly in its actual Genroku context.22 First came Akō shijūshichi-shi den赤穂四十

七士伝 in 1851, written in kanbun by Aoyama Nobumitsu青山延光, a Confucian scholarof the Mito domain, followed in 1854 by the more popular and influential Akō gishiden

issekiwa 赤穂義士伝一夕話 in ten volumes, by the prolific Edo chōnin scholar Yamazaki

Yoshishige 山崎美成, with attractive illustrations by Hashimoto Gyokuran (Sadahide) 橋本玉蘭貞秀. Written in Japanese in a lively narrative style, it served as a grand collation ofmuch existing lore about the Akō vendetta, both history and legend.

Neither of these works could quite be described as “popular” history, but rather rep-resent the beginnings of a tradition of scholarly inquiry in print into the history of the Akōincident. is type of scholarship subsided in early Meiji when the Gishi (or rather, revengesin general) were out of official political favor, but the story of the Akō revenge was reexam-ined from the late 1880s by a new generation of historical practitioners, inspired by Ger-man methods of document-based research. Shigeno Yasutsugu, considered the founder of themodern profession of academic historian in Japan, turned to the case of the Akō incident in

his Akō gishi jitsuwa of 1889, listing and evaluating all the primary documents at the start ofhis work, and then debunking the stage fantasy of Kanadehon Chūshingura in order to providea detailed historical account.23 Others would follow Shigeno over the succeeding decades,notably Fukumoto Nichinan, whose monumental Genroku kaikyoroku of 1909 remains eventoday the single most exhaustive study of the historical Akō incident.24 Even more importantfor the historical record was a large collection of documents related to the Akō incident thathad been amassed in the late Edo period by Nabeta Shōzan, and was finally published in threevolumes in 1910-11 as Akō gijin sansho.25

is documentary collection, together with Nichinan’s history, provided a treasure trovefor a new generation of historical novelists that emerged in the Taishō period. 26 Miyazawa



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Seiichi identifies Tsukahara Jūshien’s 塚原渋柿園Ōishi Yoshio 大石良雄, first serialized inthe Tōkyō Asahi shinbun 東京朝日新聞 during the war with Russia in 1904-05, as “the firsthistorical novel to take on the Akō incident seriously,” but the real growth of the popular

“period novel” ( jidai shōsetsu 時代小説

) came with a critical transition in kōdanbon fromtranscriptions of oral performances to texts written from scratch for publication, using thekōdan style and drawing on the content of many of the classic kōdan stories. e earliest ofthese were the “written kōdan” (kaki-kōdan 書き講談) of Tatsukawa (also read “Tachikawa”)Bunko立川文庫, a series of kōdanbon issued by the Osaka publisher Tatsukawa Bunmeidō 立川文明堂 from 1911.27 Whereas the Tatsukawa Bunko novels were written by a kōdan storyteller and aimed primarily at younger readers, a different kind of “written kōdan” wasbegun in 1913 following a protest by kōdan performers over Kōdansha’s publication of anissue of Kōdan kurabu featuring stories by naniwabushi singers, who were resented as low-class performers infringing on their turf. Kōdansha simply abandoned the publication of

transcribed kōdan and turned rather to professional writers to create new works in the kōdan manner. e resulting “new kōdan” (shin-kōdan 新講談) are widely acknowledged to markthe true beginnings of “mass literature” (taishū bungaku 大衆文学) in Japan, and explain theheavy reliance of such literature on historical themes.

e new historical novelists of the Taisho period were thus direct heirs to the kōdan tradition, but they were much less bound by it, and turned with increasing frequency to thewritings of modern historians of the Akō incident and to primary documents, creating a newstyle of popular historical novel that was more fastidious in its concern for period authentic-ity.28 Particular important was Osaragi Jirō’s Akō rōshi , which was serialized in the Tōkyō nichi-

nichi shinbun 東京日々新聞 from May 1927 to November 1928, and published in three

volumes by Kaizōsha in 1928-29.29

Although a few earlier writers had criticized the conven-tional idealized image of the Gishi, Osaragi attacked it head-on, providing a radical re-read-ing and deconstruction of the entire story of the Akō revenge. His approach is capsulized inthe rejection of the term “Gishi” in preference for the more neutral “rōshi 浪士” (a synonymof “rōnin” but less widely used), the term that would become standard in postwar historiogra-phy. Osaragi saw the old kōdan manner of storytelling as “feudal,” preferring the new Westernrealism of the sort that was increasingly demanded in the parallel medium of film. e entire

Akō incident was set within the complex web of Genroku politics, an approach that would beperpetuated in countless historical novels thereafter. e “rōshi ” are seen not as loyal avengersbut as protesters against the corrupt bureaucratism of Genroku politics.

Osaragi’s novel not only appeared in the context of the rising popularity of film, but itclearly drew on the inspiration of film itself, both in the increasing demand for realism andin the related emphasis on the details of daily life that film had engendered. From this pointon, all historical novelists could take advantage, consciously or otherwise, of the great vari-ety of descriptive data available both in films and in fūzokushi texts in order to provide the“vivid” detail that is often alleged to be the chief characteristic of the historical novel. SinceOsaragi’s work, there have been many more long novels on the Akō incident, including suchbehemoths as Yoshikawa Eiji, Shinpen Chūshingura 新編忠臣蔵 (2 vols., 775 pages, 1936);Funabashi Seiichi舟橋聖一, Shin Chūshingura 新忠臣蔵 (12 vols., 3571 pages,1956-61),Sakaiya Taichi 堺屋太一, Tōge no gunzō 峠の群像 (3 vols., 1357 pages, 1981-82); and



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Morimura Seiichi 森村誠一, Chūshingura (2 vols., ca 1300 pages, 1984-86)—four worksthat together come to some 7000 pages of the story of the Akō incident. e sheer length ofthese works, almost all of which were first serialized in newspapers, is a direct reflection of

the long kōdan tradition of spinning out the Chūshingura story into a series of self-enclosedmeimeiden and gaiden.In the interwar years, when film and historical novels worked together to transform

the story of the Akō Gishi in popular culture, the political valence of the tale remainedcentral—but as ever, ambiguous. In conservative circles, the Gishi (in particular, their leaderŌishi) continued to be celebrated as paragons of loyalty, and hence appropriate models tocitizens of the modern imperial state. And yet always lurking beneath the surface was theuncomfortable historical reality that the loyalty of the Gishi had been to a lesser feudal lordand not to the nation. is tension was seized upon in the war years by military officialswho came to disparage Chūshingura as an example of “small righteousness” (shōgi小義) and

not of the “Great Righteousness” (taigi大義) appropriate to the Japanese people under themodern emperor.30

e Akō Gishi in Postwar Japan: Television and the Ritualization of Chūshingura

e conception of the Akō incident as a protest against a capricious and bureaucraticregime was well suited for the revival of Chūshingura in the newly democratized Japan ofthe postwar era, symbolized by the choice in 1963 of Osaragi’s Akō rōshi as the basis for thesecond year of the NHK Sunday evening historical series known as the Taiga Drama 大河ドラマ (“grand fleuve drama”). is year-long show marked a critical turning point in themodern history of Chūshingura from film to television as the dominant medium for perpetu-

ating the tale. Naniwabushi (now know under its more genteel name of “rōkyoku浪曲”) hadsurvived strong into the early postwar years, continuing to feature tales of the Gishi promi-nently, but its decline was rapid from the 1950s with the advent of television. Chūshingurafilms had also continued strong in the early postwar period, but finally crested in 1962 withthe Tōhō 東宝 all-star version directed by Inagaki Hiroshi 稲垣浩, by no coincidence theyear before the NHK television production.

Since Akō rōshi in 1963, the Chūshingura story has been repeated fully three moretimes as the theme of NHK’s Taiga Drama, in Genroku Taiheiki元禄太平記 (1975), Tōge

no gunzō峠の群像 (1982), and Genroku ryōran 元禄繚乱 (1999)—far more than any otherof the sakuhingun. It seems that Chūshingura has become for television what Kanadehon

Chūshingura had long been for the kabuki stage, a “surefire remedy” assured of instant popu-larity. Far beyond the many appeals of the story itself, in its numerous and complex forms,this confirms the proposal of Satō Tadao the that the Chūshingura sakuhingun, having grownto enormous size over many years, has taken on a ritual quality, seen clearly in the traditionthat emerged in films from the prewar period to use the theme for commemorative “all-star”performances.31 Isolde Standish has provided a revealing analysis of the peculiar function ofChūshingura, wholly apart from its particular content, in providing the framework for thisspecial category of performance that works to perpetuate the star system in Japanese film.32

One particularly revealing indication of the ritualizing power of television is the way inwhich it has worked to concentrate Chūshingura programs in the most ritual season of the



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Japanese year, that of the New Year. Kanadehon Chūshingura had long imposed a seasonalstructure on the story itself, in which the two-year incident was compressed into a single sea-sonal year, commencing in springtime under the cherry blossoms and concluding in winter

under the falling snow. As a result, no Japanese can think of Chūshingura in any other waythan starting with blossoms and ending in snow, a happy symbolic structure for the New Year.roughout most of the ensuing two hundred years after the first performance of Kanade-

hon Chūshingura in 1747, however, it is hard to detect any particular disposition to performChūshingura, either on stage or in film, in any seasonally commemorative spirit. A closelook at the months of performance reveals that on both the kabuki and puppet stages and inprewar film as well, Chūshingura seems to have been suitable for any month. If anything, thecold winter months were avoided.33

is random pattern changed, however, with the arrival of television in the 1950s. Apart from the periodic year-long NHK dramas—which always began at the start of a new

year—dramatizations of the Akō incident have come to appear regularly on all the majorcommercial TV networks, and these programs turn out to be heavily concentrated in themonth of December. e pattern began from the start in 1953, the first year of public televi-sion broadcasting, when both NHK and Tokyo TV showed special Chūshingura dramas onDecember 14 and 15, the days of the attack on Kira. e heavy concentration of Chūshingurathemes in December has continued until this day, as clearly revealed in a detailed chronologyof Chūshinura-related television programs.34 It shows that in the four decades from 1953 to1992, over one thousand programs related to Chūshingura have been shown, of which 52per cent were in the month of December, for an average of 14.2 Chūshingura shows everyDecember—versus an average of 1.2 shows for each of the eleven other months. It seems

clear that it has been primarily the medium of television that has implanted Chūshingurainto the year-end seasonal consciousness of the Japanese nation. As Miyazawa Seiichi notes,Chūshingura has become an “annual celebration” (nenjū gyōji 年中行事), as though relivingthe story of the revenge of the Gishi at the end of the calendar year might provide a cleansingand cathartic effect that is appropriate to the season.35 Many may think of this as long-estab-lished Japanese custom, but in fact it would appear to be largely a postwar innovation by themedium of television.

But what finally are the politics of Chūshingura in the early twenty-first century? Clear-ly, this particular sakuhingun can never completely shed the legacy of its active sponsorshipby the political regime from Meiji on into the war years, whatever ambiguity it may have

harbored about the absolute qualities of “loyalty.” Nevertheless, the idea first established byOsaragi, of the “Rōshi” as reforming opponents of Genroku corruption rather than valiantdefenders of loyalty to their lord, took quick root in postwar Japan, and remains the partyline today. At the same time, the ritualization of Chūshingura productions as part of annualNew Year celebrations suggests a certain de-politicization, by which the story has becomelittle more than a national habit. is may possibly herald the obsolescence of Chūshingura,a possibility that is suggested by the inability of this greatest of all sakuhingun to make its wayinto the most notable addition to the modern media complex in Japan in recent decades, thetwo closely linked media of manga and anime . Like Yoshitsune and like the Soga Brothers, the

Akō Gishi seem to have no appeal to the youngest generation in Japan, so they may in time

become no more than hollow shells.36



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An Overview of Chūshingura as a “Sakuhingun”

Having traced the historical evolution of the structure of the Chūshingura sakuhingun

in the context of changing media complexes, it is time to stand back and recapitulate the waysin which the story of the Akō Gishi fits into Satō Tadao’s sakuhingun scheme, and on whatfurther light Chūshingura might shed on the nature of sakuhingun in general in the forma-tion and perpetuation of popular history in Japan.

To begin with, the historical Akō incident itself was especially conducive to its ex-pansion into a vast sakuhingun, most obviously because of the large number of individualsinvolved in the planning and execution of the revenge, thus conforming from the start toSatō’s requirement of many diverse individuals as a key feature of a sakuhingun. e historicalleague of revenge began with over one hundred members before attrition gradually reducedits numbers to the final forty-seven, but this process itself yielded a group of defectors who

would later provide a whole new variety of alternative stories to tell. e final league, al-though united under a single charismatic leader, was diverse in age, motivation, and person-ality, further enriching the pool of available tales by which to expand the sakuhingun. Andalthough the historical revenge did not involve the sort of wandering throughout the countrythat Satō detected as a common feature of many sakuhingun, it did involve a diversity of ap-pealing locales, from Edo to Akō to Kyoto and finally back to Edo, with much coming andgoing among these centers.

In addition, the two pivotal events in historical incident, the initial attack by Asanoin Edo Castle, and the final attack of the rōnin on Kira’s mansion, were inherently dramaticand prime material for storytellers and later film-makers. Both events were directly witnessed

only by the participants and a handful of onlookers, but the attack on Kira was immediatelyfollowed by the early morning three-hour march of the rōnin to Sengakuji, a procession thatimmensely multiplied its impact. e prohibition of news in print did nothing to stem theflood of hearsay information that inundated Edo in the days and weeks following the nightattack and march to Sengakuji, culminating in the execution of the rōnin over a month anda half later. Of course, all revenge stories had an inherent dramatic structure and point ofculmination, but none in all Japanese history were so complex, far-reaching, and publiclywitnessed as the Akō vendetta. is led in turn to the production of numerous manuscriptnarratives of the incident, most by amateur chroniclers who simply assembled their narrativesout of rumors and liberated documents that spread throughout the city. ese documents

included letters and testimony of the rōnin themselves, who had a strong consciousness oftheir own historical importance from the start and left a rich archive. is was an unevenprocess, however, transmitted entirely in manuscript, so no common and universally acces-sible archive of the Akō incident was created until the twentieth century, given the continuingproscription of any public discussion or printed distribution.

e story of the Akō revenge requires some modification of Satō’s conception of sakuhingun as rooted in tales of “noble failures” whose avenging ghosts provoke popular awe and wor-ship. It is hard to see the Gishi as failures, although they did of course pay for their successwith their lives.37 But this was precisely what they expected, and the revenge itself was a mag-nificent success. It is revealing that the execution of the rōnin on orders from the bakufu has



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often been omitted entirely from the overall story, most notably in Kanadehon Chūshingura (where the final scene suggests that they would die of their own will at Sengakuji rather thansurrender to the authorities), but also in many modern versions of the story, particularly in

film, where their ultimate fate is at best quickly alluded to as a kind of postscript.In accord with another attribute of Satō’s characterization of a sakuhingun, the entirehistory of the retelling of the Gishiden is rooted in its political import. e historical Akōincident involved all segments of the bakuhan 幕藩 system of Tokugawa rule: the rulingbakufu in its Edo headquarters, the reigning emperor in Kyoto, and various domains thatwere adjacent to Akō, related to the Asano clan, or involved in the disposition of the incidentin Edo. In these respects, it is comparable to such Bakumatsu sakuhingun as Sakamoto Ryōmaand the Shinsengumi, in which the very complexity of the politics worked to broaden itsappeal. In the Chūshingura sakuhingun, the basic theme of loyalty, in particular, could beunderstood as either loyalty to one’s local feudal lord, loyalty to the Tokugawa regime, loyalty

to one’s immediate group, or in the modern transposition, even loyalty to the emperor (seenmost dramatically in Mayama Seika’s Genroku Chūshingura ).38 e politics of the Akō incidentset it clearly apart from the many others revenge tales that might also have been candidates fora sustained sakuhingun, since it involved the revenge not of a family member but of a politicaloverlord. is unique distinction has always worked to give special power to the story of the

Akō revenge.e particular political qualities of the Akō incident, occurring at the height of sho-

gunal power in the Genroku period and hence highly sensitive to the bakufu authorities,made it particularly susceptible to a bifurcation into the dual structure that we have seen,between a legally accepted public strand in which the era was changed and the names dis-

guised (however transparently) on the puppet and kabuki stages and in printed fiction, andthe legally marginal but tolerated lineage of the Gishiden tradition in kōdan oral storytellingand jitsuroku manuscript narratives. e ironic effect of this curious structure was to enhancethe reach and durability of the Chūshingura sakuhingun as a whole. A close parallel to thismay be seen in the Taikōki tales about Hideyoshi and the tragic extinction of his line at OsakaCastle in 1615.

Another persistent feature of the Chūshingura sakuhingun has been the way in whichcertain individual works of special creative genius have helped sustain the continued growthof the larger story-complex. e jōruri text of Kanadehon Chūshingura in 1747 is particularlystriking in this respect, establishing itself as the preeminent play in both kabuki and bunraku

in short order, and spreading widely then into the broader popular print culture. And inthe modern period, Fukumoto Nichinan’s Genroku kaikyoroku, Osaragi Jirō’s Akō rōshi , andMayama Seika’s Genroku Chūshingura all infused new life into the entire Chūshingura phe-nomenon. Examples of works in other sakuhingun that triggered a quantum leap in the popu-larity of their heroes are Sarutobi Sasuke from the Tatsukawa Bunko (1914) for the Sanada

Jūyūshi, Yoshikawa Eiji’s Miyamoto Musashi (1935-39) for the title hero, and Ryōma ga yuku

竜馬がゆく(1962-66) by Shiba Ryōtarō司馬遼太郎 for Sakamoto Ryōma.e modern survival and further expansion of Chūshingura were the result of a con-

junction of parallel forces in the late Meiji period: the boom in “Bushidō” from the 1890s,the wars with China and Russia, the inspiration of new historical documentation in Genroku



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kaikyoroku and Akō gijin sansho, and the sudden emergence of Tōchūken Kumoemon as ananiwabushi sensation who specialized in the Gishiden. All of these coalesced into a multi-media “Gishi boom” in the last decade of Meiji that fed directly into the further growth of the

sakuhingun in films and historical novels. Finally, in the postwar period, Chūshingura becameritualized as a seasonal performance for the New Year season as a result of conscious decisionsby television producers.

So we can see that sakuhingun share certain broad patterns, but at the same time eachsuccessful sakuhingun has its own special features and its own distinctive pattern of growthand often decline. As a unified phenomenon, however, all have been carried on by fundamen-tal continuities in the long and deeply rooted tradition of telling historical tales in Japan, bywhich each new media complex tends to add to the existing media forms without obliteratingthe old, so that even today we can detect in the most strongly surviving sakuhingun traces ofall the successive historical stages of oral storytelling, printed narrative, stage performances,

films, historical novels, and television. All have in common the urge to use history both forentertainment and for politics, a pattern that surely will continue on into the future as well.



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典. Shin Jinbutsu Ōraisha, 1983.

Akō-shi 1987 Akō-shi Sōmubu Shishi Hensanshitsu赤穂市総務部市史編さん室, ed.Chūshingura忠臣蔵. 7 vols. Akō: Akō-shi, 1987--

Akutagawa 1917 Akutagawa Ryūnosuke芥川龍之介. “Aru hi no Ōishi Kuranosuke” 或日の大石内蔵之助. Chūō kōron中央公論 32:9 (September 1917), pp. 79–92.

Bitō 2003

Bitō Masahide. “e Akō Incident, 1701-1703.” Monumenta Nipponica 58:2(Summer 2003), pp. 149-70.

Craig 1961 Albert Craig. Chōshū in the Meiji Restoration. Harvard University Press, 1961.

Dym 2003 Jeffrey A. Dym. Benshi, Japanese Silent Film Narrators, and eir Forgotten Narrative

Art of Setsumei . e Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.

Fukumoto 1909Fukumoto Nichinan福本日南. Genroku kaikyoroku元禄快擧録. Keiseisha, 1909.

Fukumoto 1914———. Genroku kaikyo shinsōroku元禄快挙真相録. Tōadō Shoten, 1914.

Himeji Bungakukan 2004Himeji Bungakukan姫路文学館, ed. Taishō no bunko-ō Tatsukawa Kumajirō to

‘Tatsukawa Bunko’ 大正の文庫王立川熊次郎と「立川文庫」. Himeji: HimejiBungakukan, 2004.

Hyōdō 2000Hyōdō Hiromi兵藤裕巳. ‘Koe’ no kokumin kokka, Nihon 〈声〉の国民国家・日

本. Nippon Hōsō Shuppan Kyōkai, 2000.

Hyōdō and Smith forthcomingHyōdō Hiromi兵藤裕巳 and Henry Smith. “Singing Tales of the Gishi:Naniwabushi and the Nationalization of Chūshingura.” Monumenta Nipponica ,forthcoming.

Katashima 1719Katashima Takenori (Shin’en)片島武矩(深淵). Sekijō gishinden 赤城義臣伝.Osaka: Kawachiya Genshichirō, 1719.



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Kominz 1995Laurence R. Kominz. Avatars of Vengeance: Japanese Drama and the Soga LiteraryTradition. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, e University of Michigan, 1995.

Konta 1981Konta Yōzō今田洋三. Edo no kinsho 江戸の禁書. Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1981.

Kornicki 1982P. F. Kornicki. “e Enmeiin Affair of 1803: e Spread of Information in eTokugawa Period.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42:2. (December 1982), pp.503-533.

Maruya 1984Maruya Saiichi丸谷才一. Chūshingura to wa nanika忠臣蔵とは何か. Kōdansha,1984.

McCullough 1966Helen Craig McCullough. Yoshitsune: A Fifteenth-Century Japanese Chronicle . StanfordUniversity Press, 1966.

Misono 1966Misono Kyōhei御園京平. Eiga Chūshingura 映画忠臣蔵. Privately published,1966.

Miyazawa 2001Miyazawa Seiichi宮澤誠一. Kindai Nihon to ‘Chūshingura’ gensō 近代日本と「忠

臣蔵」幻想. Aoki Shoten, 2001.

Morris 1975Ivan Morris. e Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan. New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975.

Nabeta 1910–1911Nabeta Shōzan鍋田晶山, ed. Akō gijin sansho赤穂義人纂書. 3 vols. KokushoKankōkai, 1910–1911.

Ofuregaki Kanpō shūsei 1934Takahashi Shinzō 高橋真三 and Ishii Ryōsuke石井良助, eds. Ofuregaki Kanpō

shūsei 御触書寛保集成. Iwanami Shoten, 1934.

Osaragi 1928–29Osaragi Jirō 大仏次郎. Akō rōshi赤穂浪士. 3 vols. Kaizōsha, 1928–29.

Ōsumi 2000Ōsumi Kazuo大隅和雄 et al, eds. Nihon kakū denshō jinmei jiten 日本架空伝承人

名事典. Expanded edition. Heibonsha, 2000.

Powell 1984Brian Powell. “e Samurai Ethic in Mayama Seika’s Genroku Chūshingura .” Modern

Asian Studies , 18:4 (1984), pp. 725-45.



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Ruch 1977Barbara Ruch. “Medieval Jongleurs and the Making of a National Literature.” In

Japan in the Muromachi Age , ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. University of

California Press, 1977.Satō 1976

Satō Tadao佐藤忠男. Chūshingura: Iji no keifu忠臣蔵:意地の系譜. AsahiShinbunsha, 1976.

Shigeno 1889Shigeno Yasutsugu重野安繹. Akō gishi jitsuwa赤穂義士実話. Taiseikan, 1889.Reprinted in Meiji shiron shū (2) 明治史論集（二）, vol. 78 of Meiji bungakuzenshū 明治文学全集. Chikuma Shobō, 1976.

Shively 1982

Donald H. Shively. “Tokugawa Plays on Forbidden Topics.” In Chūshingura: Studiesin Kabuki and the Puppet eater , ed. James R. Brandon. University of Hawai’i Press,1982.

Smith 1990Henry D. Smith II. “Chūshingura in the 1980s: Rethinking the Story of the 47Ronin.” Paper presented at the Modern Japan Seminar, Columbia University, April1990. Revised August 2003 and posted at http://www.columbia.edu/~hds2/47ronin/47ronin_rev.htm. Accessed January 4, 2006.

Smith 2003

———. “e Capacity of Chūshingura.” Monumenta Nipponica 58:1 (Spring 2003),pp. 1–42.

Smith 2004———. “e Trouble with Terasaka: e Forty-Seventh Rōnin and the ChūshinguraImagination.” Nichibunken Japan Review , 14 (2004), pp. 3-65.

Smith forthcoming———. “Ryōma in Kyoto: Getting in Personal Touch with the Past in Heisei Japan.”In Japan and Its Worlds: e Internationalization of Japanese Studies , ed. Mikio Katoand Ronald Toby. International House of Japan, forthcoming.

Standish 2005Isolde Standish. “Chūshingura and the Japanese Studio System.” Japan Forum 17:1(2005), pp. 69-86.

Yamamoto 1972 Yamamoto Tsuneo山本恒夫. Kindai Nihon toshi kyōkashi kenkyū 近代日本都市教化史研究. Reimei Shobō, 1972.

Yamamoto 2002 Yamamoto Takashi 山本卓. “Gishiden jitsuroku to Ehon Chūshingura ” 義士伝実録と『絵本忠臣蔵』 Bungaku 文学, 3:3 (May-June, 2002), pp. 27-39.



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NOTES

1 Satō 1976, pp. 113-38. e older sakuhingun have been studied by scholars of literature, and themodern ones by those in the separate fields of film and popular fiction, but rarely have these investiga-

tions focused on the linkages among different media. In English, McCullough 1966, pp. 30-61, offers

a detailed account of the evolution of Yoshitsune from history to legend, but does not go beyond themedieval period. For the Soga Brothers, Kominz 1995 is an excellent study of the way in which that par-

ticular story developed within the kabuki tradition, where it survives today but in an attenuated form;

see below for the Soga Brothers in film. For Sakamoto Ryōma, see Smith, forthcoming. For the moderndevelopment of the Chūshingura sakuhingun in multiple media, Miyazawa 2001 is an indispensable ac-

count, on which I have relied heavily. Ōsumi 2000 is a useful reference work that includes many of the

heroes of sakuhingun and information on their evolution as legends in different genres and media.2 Brief biographies of these two imaginary characters may be found in Akō Gishi Kenshōkai 1983, pp.405 and 433.3

Morris 1975. McCullough 1966, p. 30, notes that the term hōgan biiki emerged “during or shortlyafter the lifetime” of Yoshitsune.4 Note should here be made of the only one of the “ree Great Revenges” (Sandai katakiuchi 三大

敵討) that does not appear among Satō’s list of the leading sakuhingun, of which the first two are the

Soga Brothers and Chūshingura. is is the Igagoe 伊賀越 revenge of 1634, known more widely bythe name of the hired sword who was critical to the success of the final battle, Araki Mataemon 荒木

又右衛門. e tale survived strong into prewar film (with a total of thirty-nine movies in the thirty-

three-year period 1909-1941), but it did not survive beyond a brief postwar revival in the 1950s, and

is generally unknown today.5 Kominz 1995, ch. 7, provides a detailed account of this tradition, which continued on into the first

years of the twentieth century and then disappeared.6

e most extreme version linking the Gishi with vengeful spirits was the elaborate argument ofMaruya Saiichi in his provocative and controversial book of 1985, Chūshingura to wa nanika (“What is

Chūshingura?”), in which he offered an intricate elaboration of Satō Tadao’s initial suggestion by argu-

ing that the Akō revenge was literally a “dramatic” act, by which the Gishi were re-enacting in real lifethe stage revenge of the Soga Brothers that had become so popular in Edo kabuki of the Genroku era.

See Maruya 1984. For the Soga tradition in kabuki, see Kominz 1995.7 “Shomin seikatsu to seiji o musubitsukeru mono庶民生活と政治を結びつけるもの.” Satō 1976, p.

133.8 Ruch 1977, pp. 286-94, 303-07. Note that the “books” described by Ruch were in the formats of both

scrolls and codex (sasshi冊子, what we today usually mean by the word “book”). Printed books in the

Tokugawa period were almost entirely in the sasshi format.

9 e following data for the editions of various texts are taken from the catalog of premodern Japa-nese books (Wakosho mokuroku 和古書目録) maintained by the Kokubungaku Kenkyū Shiryōkan国文学研究資料館 (National Institute of Japanese Literature), available online at http://base1.nijl.ac.jp/~wakosho/. ere may be additional editions that are not represented in this catalog.10 Ofuregaku Kanpō shūsei 1934, edicts 2220 (1673), 2013-14 (1684), and 2015 (1698). For secondary

accounts of this process, see Konta 1981, pp. 65-66, and Shively 1982, pp. 25-26.11 e one exception was Katashima 1719, which was quickly banned. For details, see Smith 2003, p.23.12 In the text of Kanadehon Chūshingura , by contrast, the word “ gishi ” only occurs once—and the word

“rōnin” fifteen times.13 is is by no means to say that jitsuroku were never suppressed; see Kornicki 1982 for a detailed ac-



97


count of one such case.14 Hyōdō 2000, pp. 17-74, describes the origins and rise of naniwabushi . In English, see Hyōdō andSmith, forthcoming.15 Smith 2003, p. 32. e complex issue of the relationship of feudal loyalty to both imperial loyalty and

modern nationalism has been debated ever since it was raised in Craig 1961, pp. 145-55 and 365-71,and remains a matter of continuing debate.16 Yamamoto 1972, pp. 330-76.17 For Chūshingura in film, see Misono 1966, Satō 1976, pp. 138-61, and the chronology of films in

Akō-shi 1987, vol. 5, pp. 791-807.18 Dym 2003, pp. 9-12, 84-5, 70-1.19 Powell 1984, p. 728.20 Hyōdō 2000, p. 8.21 Yamamoto 200222 For more detail on these works, see Smith 2004, pp. 27-29, from which the material in this paragraph

is taken.23 Shigeno 1889.24 Fukumoto 1909. is work was revised five years later as a result of the revelations of the documents

in Akō gijin sansho (see next note); Fukumoto 1914.25 Nabeta 1910–1911. See Akō Gishi Kenshōkai 1983, pp. 503–507, for a history of the Akō gijin

sansho.26 For details about the emergence of historical novels about the Akō incident, see Miyazawa 2001, pp.

84-6, 112-16, and 121-23.27 e Tatsukawa Bunko was printed in a diminutive format of 12.5 x 9 cm and totaled over 200

volumes by the time the series ended in 1924. It was these series that single-handedly created the newsakuhingun of the “Ten Brave Heroes” of Sanada Yukimura (particularly Sarutobi Sasuke 猿飛佐助

and Kirigakure Saizō霧隠才蔵, the two of the ten who were wholly fictional creations of the series),with fully 18 volumes on that theme. Most were written by the kōdan storyteller Tamada Gyokushūsai玉田玉秀斎. For the history of the Tatsukawa Bunko, see Himeji Bungakukan 2004.28 e same trend was seen in certain shorter works of “pure literature” ( jun-bungaku純文学) as well,

notably “Aru hi no Ōishi Kuranosuke” by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (Akutagawa 1917), for which see

Smith 2003, p. 31. Works of this sort are now often referred to as “rekishi shōsetsu” 歴史小説 to

distinguish them from the more popular jidai shōsetsu.29 Osaragi 1928-29.30 Miyazawa 2001, p. 198.31 Satō 1976, p. 138.32 Standish 2005.

33 Chronologies of all known historical performances of Kanadehon Chūshingura are provided in Akō-shi 1987, v. 5, pp. 1-694 for kabuki and pp. 695-790 for jōruri.34 Akō-shi 1987, vol. 5, pp. 809-888.35 Miyazawa 2001, p. 8.36 See Smith 1990 for a discussion of the changing popularity of Chūshingura in the 1980s and

1990s.37 It is important to remember that under the Tokugawa system of legal revenge, avengers were often

rewarded rather than punished. e Akō revenge, however, did not conform to the dictates of legal

revenge; the complex implications of this distinction are analyzed in Bitō 2003, pp. 160-62.38 Powell 1984.

media and politics of japanese history

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